The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [21]
Wolves in the city indeed.
Gold touched the back of his own head. “There have been celebrated Mozart scholars over the years. They could tell you every detail of his life; they studied every one of his compositions. Perhaps they could recognize a Mozart symphony in the span of a quarter note. Nevertheless, they could never write a Mozart symphony. This is because you can’t deconstruct genius. You can’t re-create it. You can’t even understand it. Brilliance is a mysterious current that flows one way from the genius out.”
Gold rubbed the fleshy part of his left hand with his right thumb. “And yet I have reconstructed a lost work of Mozart. I have finished the requiem exactly the way Mozart was planning to had he lived.”
This was the kind of insanity Reggie had tried to keep off the witness stand. After his arrest, Gold had been charged with murder with special circumstances and held without bail in a private cell in Division 9, the maximum-security wing at the Cook County Jail. He wasn’t treated much like the other inmates, but County was no golf club. Somehow, he always managed to keep his County tans as unwrinkled as his Armani.
“I discovered that Mozart was following a map.” Gold opened his palms in front of his face like a book. “A map of the heavens, you might say. The answer Süssmayr sought was not musical. The answer was mathematical.”
“Mathematical.”
Gold nodded. “Mmmm.”
“I don’t follow.”
Gold seemed unsurprised. “I believe art is a repository of truths. Art is where truth hides from politics and religion and law and history and war and lust and greed and time, anything that seeks to subvert and tarnish and exploit it. Art is a safe in which man keeps his soul.” He waited for a reaction and looked disappointed when he didn’t get it.
“I listened to the requiem after finding this map and I did it with new ears. The notes that had been Mozart’s were suddenly obvious, and the missing notes just as evident. I’ve never had an experience like it. Religious, I suppose you’d say. In jail, the requiem became my calling.”
“And where did you find this map of Mozart’s?” Reggie asked.
“The same place he did.” Solomon tapped himself above the ear. “But I studied the texts, as well. Plato. Nicomachus. Al-Hasan al-Katib. Giorgio Anselmi. Isaac Newton.”
“I’ve heard of the first one and the last.”
“A man of your talents must know of Cicero.”
Reggie bobbed his head once. “Roman orator.”
“‘The revolutions of the planets produce seven sounds, and this number seven is the bond of well nigh all things.’” When that didn’t get a reaction, Gold said, “It’s an equation. The requiem is a mathematical equation.”
Reggie rubbed his cheek. Solomon had a habit of never explaining himself, as if his genius would be cheapened if he told you what the hell he was talking about.
Solomon said, “I wanted you to be one of the first to see the completed work. If not for your efforts, the debut performance of my masterpiece might have been by some goddamn Stateville jug band. Or maybe at my own funeral.”
If not for me, Reggie thought. He felt the bite of an angry tear almost forming in his eye and he turned his head. He saw the violin on a padded instrument stand in the corner. The Guarneri. It had been purchased for more than a million dollars as part of a complicated sponsorship agreement, and after Gold’s arrest, the Boeing Company tried to force him to return it. Gold sued for breach of contract and the violin sat in safe-deposit purgatory throughout the trial.
“Reg,” Gold continued after a pause, “there are people who won’t want me to publish this. They’ll think it blasphemy. Dangerous even. If they knew my intentions to do